The BBC has launched the News Timeliner. “The Timeliner uses collections of inter-connected short-form videos to give context to current news stories and aims to trigger memories and journeys into key moments in the past. The current version explores the history of British Politics and Elections through a series of timelines for audiences to experience in the build up to the general election.”

Harvard is digitizing its collection of early English manor rolls. “The manor roll collection consists of 170 court-rolls, account-rolls, and other documents from various manors, ranging in date from 1282 to 1770. The largest concentration comes from the manor of Moulton in Cheshire. Other manors represented are Odiham Hundred, Hampshire; Herstmonceaux, Sussex; Chartley, Staffordshire; and Onehouse, Suffolk. A limited number of materials in this collection are single-sheet charters and one item is a map of the manor of Shelly, Suffolk.”

The Washington Post has created a searchable database of the White House visitor logs. “The data can be messy: You may find weird glitches and we can’t verify that the data is complete. We’ll also note that the White House logs often include middle initials. Searches in our tool use the entire name provided by the White House, so ‘John A Smith’ and ‘John Smith’ are different people — and a search for “John Smith” won’t turn up the John with the middle initial. After all, we don’t know if John A. Smith is the same as John Smith, so we want to keep them separate.”

Google Translate has a new Chrome extension. “Simply highlight the text that you want to translate, and then click the Translate icon that appears. You can also right click and choose ‘Google Translate’. If you click the icon in the upper right of your browser window, with no text highlighted, you can translate the entire web page.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Amazon is now offering unlimited cloud drive storage. “Unlimited Cloud Storage will let users get either unlimited photo storage or ‘unlimited everything’ — covering all kinds of media from videos and music through to PDF documents — respectively for $11.99 or $59.99 per year.” Couple of things: 1) One of the commenters points out there’s a file size limit of 2GB. 2) Amazon wants you to store all your files with it, yet consumers still do not have the option of two factor login. Considering the ongoing security issues the Internet faces, it seems increasingly tin-eared to offer services like this without commensurate security.

Google Keep now has labels. Still not trusting enough to move away from Evernote.

New York University Libraries are teaming up wtih the Internet Archive. “New York University Libraries is leading a collaboration with NYU’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation (MIAP) program and San Francisco-based Archive-It, a service of the Internet Archive (IA) to ensure that the websites of musical composers can be collected, preserved, and made accessible today and in the future, with sound and visual quality at a level significantly higher than current web archiving standards. The project, Archiving the Websites of Contemporary Composers, is funded with a grant of $480,000 from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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Now available from Bangladesh: a digital archive of agricultural theses. “Till now, nearly 6,000 theses and journals of different agricultural universities of Bangladesh have been included in the archive.” I went for a quick browse and everything I saw was in English.

The University of North Dakota Writers Conference is Working on digitizing its decades of archives. “One short montage of ‘greatest hits’ clips includes Allen Ginsberg playing drums, Tom Wolfe talking about the Hell’s Angels singing a variation of the Oscar Meyer wiener song and Truman Capote talking about New Journalism.” There is already some material available online, though there’s lots more to do.

Possibly not new, but new to me: I had no idea there was a digital archive for the illustrations of H. Rider Haggard novels. “The majority of Haggard’s approximately fifty novels were lushly illustrated, many of them repeatedly in different editions and by different illustrators. Illustration was always an essential part of reading Haggard’s romances during the nineteenth-century. Visual Haggard seeks to revalue and reintegrate the illustrations of Haggard’s novels as unique artworks and texts for contemporary audiences.”

The Indianapolis Museum of Art has released a new online collection (PRESS RELEASE). “The new online collection offers a visually rich platform with over 33,000 high-quality images available for viewing and high-res zooming capabilities to provide detailed views of assorted works. A hallmark of the new website is the 21,000 images now available for high-res download, providing open access to imagery for any personal, scholarly or commercial use. Multiple views of many three-dimensional works are also available to provide a unique online viewing experience for the site user.”

The British Library needs your help georeferencing its map collection. “Using the BL Georeferencer online application, you will be presented with a historic map from a 19th century book; by finding the location on a modern map or imagery alongside, the old map is ‘georeferenced’, and can be overlaid and interacted with in your browser…”

Yahoo issued a new transparency report last week. “This latest transparency report contains information covering the last six months of 2014 (July 1 – December 31, 2014). This includes National Security Letters (NSLs) and criminal data requests (such as search warrants, court orders, and subpoenas issued in criminal investigations). FISA requests included are from January 1 – June 30, 2014, as they are subject to a six-month delay imposed by the U.S. Government.”

Google has been granted a patent for its “smart” contact lens. “As TIME has previously reported, Google has been testing various prototypes of smart contact lens and is currently in talks with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) about a lens that measures glucose levels in users’ tears. The company says the chip and sensor are embedded between two layers of contact lens material and a tiny pinhole lets tear fluid from the eye reach the glucose sensor, and the sensor can measure levels every second.” Good morning, Internet…

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Now available: a huge collection of online medical journals. “While we encourage you to explore the full-text search tool available on our website, you can now also browse over 3,000 volumes that comprise our 336 journal titles. If you’d rather browse by date or search all fields, we encourage you to download the CSV file, also available on the journals browse page.”

Flickr Commons has reached 100 institutions with the addition of the VCU Libraries. “The VCU Libraries include prints, works of art, historic and medical artifacts, archives and manuscripts, maps and rare books and periodicals, as well as one of the largest collections of comic arts, book art, alternative newspapers and zines in the USA.” Apparently now even when paging through the Flickr Commons, you get big, jarring ads in the middle of the streams. Ick.

Google is launching a major push to get businesses and business information online. I’d probably feel better about this if I hadn’t been using Google My Business for years. It’s always been bumpy and it became a nightmare when it got integrated into Google+. Not to mention the Saturday when I was trying to have a peaceful lunch and suddenly got the phone call that Google had suddenly marked one of our stores as “closed permanently” and we were getting phone calls from concerned customers. Why had it done that? I never got an answer…

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

ProQuest and Google are teaming up for full-text indexing (I think this is a press release.) “ProQuest will enable the full text of its scholarly journal content to be indexed in Google Scholar, improving research outcomes. Work is underway and the company anticipates that by the third-quarter of 2015, users starting their research in Google Scholar will be able to access scholarly content via ProQuest.”

Tech companies are teaming up to demand an end to the NSA’s collection of bulk metadata. “The missive concerns Sections 215 and 214 of the PATRIOT Act, a law passed in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks that’s been a key legal foundation for the government’s collection of Americans’ call record metadata, for example. The now-infamous Section 215 of the act will sunset on June 1, barring Congressional action.”

The SEC has ruled that startups can sell stock online to anyone. “he Securities and Exchange Commission voted unanimously on Wednesday to adopt rules that permit startups to raise money from the vast majority of Americans, including provisions that allow for deals to be made over the Internet. Previously, only individuals with more than $1 million in net worth or income of at least $200,000 for each of the last two years — so called “accredited investors” — could easily invest in startups. Some websites already offer the chance to invest in startups online, but prospective investors had to be accredited and subject to more stringent regulations.” As long as people think of this as less of a “retirement fund” investment and more of a “scratch ticket” investment…

The Biodiversity Heritage Library wants some crowdsourcing help transcribing its seed catalogs. “In celebration of our Garden Stories event, we’ve released some of our seed catalogs for transcription as part of our Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS)-funded Purposeful Gaming project. Seed catalogs are notoriously difficult subjects for Optical Character Recognition software (OCR) to parse (which produces searchable text files of digitized images), so searching the text of online vintage seed catalogs is often problematic.”

Au.to is a new search engine for used cars (PRESS RELEASE). “Like Google, AU.TO crawls the web seeking out cars for sale, collecting both vehicle and dealer data, and sorting vehicles based on user predicted interest, thereby providing custom-tailored search results for individual users. AU.TO features a lightning fast, text-based search, yielding results in milliseconds, not minutes. It also provides the first user-predicted interest algorithm for online car shopping: Think Pandora for cars.” You know, you could just be a search engine for used cars. Comparisons to Google and Pandora aren’t necessary…

Reddit now lets you embed its comments on your site. “To generate the necessary code simply click on a comment’s permalink page, then select ‘embed’ to generate the code you need to copy. You also have the option to include parent comments.”

Real estate site Zillow has launched an updated agent finder. “The new tool takes into account ratings from Zillow’s users, as well as data about who the most active agents in a given area are (based on past sales and their number of current listings). Prospective home buyers and sellers can then filter according to their price points, needs and specialties (relocations, short sale, etc.), as well as the languages the agent speaks.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Jack Schofield takes a look at Twitter tool Nuzzel. Thanks to my sojourn in Ick Limbo last weekend, I spent a lot of time tweaking Twitter and Tweetdeck and this past week I’ve found that between a carefully-cultivated TweetDeck and Nuzzel, Twitter can be more interesting than Facebook. (Of course, I also discovered that there are some ridiculously frustrating things about Nuzzel, but that’s a different article.)

Google is pushing back against stories about how much time/effort it spends on DC. “Having whittled its visit count down, Google says it consulted the White House records for other companies. It claims Microsoft made 270 visits over the same period, whereas Comcast made 150 visits — which is in stark contrast to the WSJ’s claims of just 20.” I have never liked the “but this other guy is doing it too” method of defense…

More More Google: Is Google setting up a billing payment service for GMail? “The service, dubbed Pony Express, would ask users to provide personal information, including credit card and Social Security numbers, to a third-party company that would verify their identity, according to a Re/code report on Tuesday.” What could POSSIBLY go wrong? Good afternoon, Internet…

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Georgia State University has launched new online exhibits. “The current exhibit topics include the history of radio broadcasting in Georgia, history of Atlanta women’s organizations, and grass roots activism. Additional exhibits will be added periodically in the future.”

Pixar has made its rendering engine, Renderman free (as in beer). “To download Renderman, Pixar requires you to register for a forum account and provide a valid e-mail address. Once that’s done, you are given an installation package which in turn downloads the actual Renderman components appropriate for your operating system and 3D package.” Note this is for non-commercial use only. Do you wanna render a snowman?

There’s a new pay-to-view video service in town: Vessel. “The videomakers who plan to debut content on Vessel include GloZell Green, MinutePhysics, FailArmy, Brittani Louise Taylor, Shane Dawson and dozens more. Vessel also has exclusive content, such as a reality show about romantic relationships starring Alec Baldwin.”

USEFUL STUFF

From PC World (Warning! PC World!): 5 Google Drive Tricks. I would like a trick to get the Google Drive index page the way it used to be. The new one is awful.

Want to know if your GMail is being tracked (by marketing companies and so forth)? There’s a Chrome extension for that. “Ugly Email is a free Chrome browser extension that works on the Gmail website, and it serves one purpose: To let you know when an email is being tracked before you open it.”

The Wall Street Journal has an eye-widening article about how much money and time Google spends on Washington. “Last year, Google spent $16.8 million on lobbyists, more than any other company except for Comcast, according to lobbying disclosures. The 2014 total by Google is more than triple the company’s lobbying spending in 2010, the year before the FTC antitrust probe began, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Google has about 100 individual lobbyists at 20 lobbying firms.”

More Google: it is warning about unauthorized TLS certificates. “The bogus transport layer security certificates are trusted by all major operating systems and browsers, although a fall-back mechanism known as public key pinning prevented the Chrome and Firefox browsers from accepting those that vouched for the authenticity of Google properties, Google security engineer Adam Langley wrote in a blog post published Monday. The certificates were issued by Egypt-based MCS Holdings, an intermediate certificate authority that operates under the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC). The Chinese domain registrar and certificate authority, in turn, is included in root stores for virtually all OSes and browsers.”

Harvard, Ohio State, the University of British Columbia, and 10 University of California institutions are getting involved in a project to develop a financial model for open access. “‘Pay It Forward: Investigating a Sustainable Model of Open Access Article Processing Charges for Large North American Research Institutions’ is a yearlong effort to study the implications of new funding models for scholarly communications, particularly the use of article processing charges, and determine their sustainability for research universities in the United States and Canada. The project partnership includes three major research libraries (Harvard University, Ohio State University and the University of British Columbia) as well as the 10 University of California campuses. The project will create a detailed, flexible, and publicly available financial model to help university administrators and librarians develop open access policies and strategies.”

Artifacts destroyed in Mosul will be rebuilt in 3-D. “Two weeks after the sacking of the 300 year-old Mosul Museum by a group of ISIS extremists went viral on Youtube, researchers from the ITN-DCH, IAPP and 4D-CH-WORLD projects launched Project MOSUL to virtually restore damaged artefacts and make them accessible from virtual museums…. To reach this objective, the team is planning to use 4D-CH-WORLD’s technology to reconstruct and model Mosul artefacts virtually from crowd-sourced images available online. 4D-CH-World has spent the past two years designing what it calls the ‘first worldwide fully automated 4D reconstruction system capable of handling large image galleries in the wild.'”

Dumfries and Galloway’s Library and Archive Service has launched an online image archive. “Collection highlights include a postcard of the German air ship the Hindenberg over Drummore, the Lusitania off the coast of Galloway, the Queen Mother at Park Farm in Dumfries, JM Barrie with the cast of the Duke of Christmas Daisies and the Burns Statue inauguration in Dumfries in 1882.” Looks like about 3400 items at the moment, with more being added regularly.

New York Police Department crime scene photos will be digitized and put online. “The trove includes well-known scenes, like the Audubon Ballroom in Manhattan shortly after Malcolm X was assassinated there in 1965, and exploded lockers at Pennsylvania Station from one of the many attacks in the 16-year rampage in the 1940s and 1950s of George P. Metesky, the so-called Mad Bomber.”

Twitter is testing an offensive tweet filter. “Revealed in a tweet posted Monday by ThinkUp CEO and blogger Anil Dash, the feature known as ‘quality filtering’ is intended to ‘remove all Tweets from your notifications timeline that contain threats, offensive or abusive language, duplicate content, or are sent from suspicious accounts.’ The feature appears as an option on the iOS app’s Notifications screen, where you can turn it on or off.” This new feature is being tested with some of Twitter’s verified users, and not joyless proles like you or me. Well, me anyway.

Twitter is also testing a new suggestion feature. “Spotted today by Marketing Land editor in chief Matt McGee, the ‘You may also like’ feature shows up in the right-rail on some individual tweet pages. It shows several tweets, some related to the content of the main tweet, some not. With the small sample-size — we saw the display on four of 10 tweets we checked — it wasn’t possible to see a pattern.”

Interesting: How one university archive (Princeton) uses Tumblr. “The design of our Tumblr page reflects what I wanted to convey: Yes, we’re a special collections library with a lot of old stuff, but it’s cool old stuff. We don’t take ourselves too seriously. We’re not always going to try to teach you about the storied history of Princeton—although you will get a sense of that if you keep reading for a while. Instead, like the Comedy Central show, Drunk History, we show you the things that make those of us who work in the archives laugh. Along the way, we also tell the story of Princeton in bits and pieces in a format we hope is entertaining and visually appealing.”

Bing may remove navigation to additional pages of search results past the first. “Bing may drop their paginated search results for some search queries where they are confident that page one of the search results are ‘the most relevant results’ for the query.” One of the commenters to the story said Bing has been doing this for years, but I’d never seen it before – maybe I’ve never searched for something obscure enough? This is a really terrible idea.

Instagram has launched a new app that lets you combine multiple photos into one image. “When you open Layout, we automatically show you previews of custom layouts as you choose photos from your camera roll. To make it easier to find the photos you want, we’ve also added a Faces option that shows you all the photos in your camera roll that feature people. From there, you have complete artistic control. Drag and drop photos to rearrange them, pinch to zoom or pull the sides of each photo to adjust its size and get your layout just right. Then flip and rotate your photos to create cool arrangements and mirror effects.”

More Instagram: The US Census Bureau has launched an Instagram account (PRESS RELEASE). “The account will provide an outlet for the public to view the story behind the numbers, starting with the 2015 Census Test in the Savannah, Ga., area. Follow the Census Bureau on Instagram at @u.s.censusbureau.”

Twitter is partnering with FourSquare to let you tag locations in tweets. Long overdue and a marvelous idea. “Tags for location can be general, or can be a specific business, landmark, or other point of interest. Mobile Twitter users will still have tweets labelled with their precise location in addition to any label selected.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

This is interesting and a bit weird and a kick in the pants for YouTube: Twitch is livestreaming a music festival (PRESS RELEASE). “Twitch, the world’s leading social video platform and community for gamers, continues its foray into music as an official broadcasting partner of Ultra Music Festival, the world’s premier electronic music festival. This year’s live stream will be powered by 7UP®, the exclusive sponsor of the stream for the 2015 music festival. Scheduled for March 27-29 during Miami Music Week, the entire festival will be broadcast live on Twitch at twitch.tv/ultra.”

Yikes! More Twitch news, this time bad: looks like it got hacked. (You can use Twitch without having an account, though.)

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SpaceX photos are now available under a Creative Commons license. “Wednesday night, the company created an official Flickr account with all of the photos released under what’s known as a Creative Commons license, which gives the public the chance to reuse and share the photos in many cases.”

YouTube’s autoplay is now enabled by default. Incredibly disconcerting when you’re not expecting that next video.

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

According to an FTC report, Google purposely demoted competing sites in its search engine listings. There’s a lot of “Yeah but,” and “We were only…” in the updates to this article, but it is very disheartening. There’s another story at Search Engine Land that makes me even sadder. “An ‘inadvertently disclosed’ report from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) labels Google a monopoly and appears to directly contradict the decision not to pursue legal action against the company. In early 2013 the FTC formally decided to close its antitrust investigation against Google demanding only modest changes in the company’s business practices. It turns out a vocal contingent inside the FTC wanted stronger action. The existence of the critical 160 page report was discussed in a Wall Street Journal (WSJ) article today. The WSJ says the report was mistakenly disclosed in response to a FOIA request.” I want to see the whole report….

More Google: it has created a tablet that can be used by health workers treating ebola patients. “During the testing phase, the server ran off a motorcycle battery, but now it includes its own lithium ion batteries, much like those in your cell phone, which can charge via a portable generator. Then, inside the high-risk zone, [Jay] Archar can not only wirelessly send data over the fence, but also readily access information he didn’t have before, including a patient’s latest blood test results. Plus, after dipping the thing in chlorine for ten minutes, he can take it outside the zone and continue working with it after removing his moon suit.”

Interesting article in The New Yorker (yes, The New Yorker) about the language of Twitter and how it can predict mortality rates in regions, not people. “The psychologist Johannes Eichstaedt and his colleagues analyzed eight hundred and twenty-six million tweets across fourteen hundred American counties. (The counties contained close to ninety per cent of the U.S. population.) Then, using lists of words—some developed by Pennebaker, others by Eichstaedt’s team—that can be reliably associated with anger, anxiety, social engagement, and positive and negative emotions, they gave each county an emotional profile. Finally, they asked a simple question: Could those profiles help determine which counties were likely to have more deaths from heart disease? The answer, it turned out, was yes. Counties where residents’ tweets included words related to hostility, aggression, hate, and, fatigue … had significantly higher rates of death from atherosclerotic heart disease, including heart attacks and strokes. Conversely, where people’s tweets reflected more positive emotions and engagement, heart disease was less common. The tweet-based model even had more predictive power than other models based on traditional demographic, socioeconomic, and health-risk factors.” I removed the example words because one of them would trip an obscenity filter. Fascinating article; there’s a link to a tool to analyze the language of your tweets, as well.

Are you interested in the music that was SXSW? There’s a torrent for that. “Since 2005 the SXSW music festival has published thousands of DRM-free tracks from participating artists….In common with previous years, Ben Stolt has taken the time and effort to upload all of the MP3s onto BitTorrent with proper ID3 tags. The 2015 release is out now and comes in two torrents containing 1,291 tracks… All the tracks released for the previous editions are also still available for those people who want to fill up their MP3 players without having to invest thousands of dollars. The 2005 – 2015 archives now total more than 55 gigabytes.”

Analytics for some US Government Web sites are now available. “The analytics dashboard also offers an up-close look at what devices and operating systems people are using. Smartphones and tablets, for example, make up more than 30% of traffic from the last 90 days. This information, which is standard for web analytics, helps influence where the still-growing Digital Service focuses its attention.”

Fold 3 has some new content. “One new collection on Fold3 is the WWII Cadet Nursing Corps Card Files, which contains membership cards of women who joined the corps. The Cadet Nursing Corps was created in 1943 under the U.S. Public Health Service to help fill a growing need for nurses that had been compounded by World War II. Between 1943 and 1948 (the years the program ran), about 179,000 students between the ages of 17 and 35 joined the corps, with roughly 124,000 of them graduating.”

The Wikimedia Foundation has adopted an open-access policy. “The Wikimedia Foundation is committed to making knowledge of all forms freely available to the world. Beginning today, our new Open Access Policy will ensure that all research work produced with support from the Wikimedia Foundation will be openly available to the public and reusable on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia sites.”

Is Mall of America using Facebook to keep tabs on local activists? “It seems that in order to prevent or better prepare for future disruptions if and when they might take place, a report from The Intercept revealed that the mall actually had a fake Facebook profile setup in which they allegedly use it to monitor activists on social network. To be fair the profile was said to have been created back in 2009, but recent activity saw the fake profile like pages like Black Lives Matter and also friended 817 other people, most of whom are reported to have ties to the local Minnesota political activism groups.”

Google is “starting over” in its drone war with Amazon. “The Project Wing delivery drone Google revealed to the world last August is no more. Instead of going head to head with Amazon’s drone initiative, the Google X team behind the UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) decided to scrap its plans and pursue a different design.”

Wow: UC Davis live-tweeted lung cancer surgery. “To prepare for the live Twitter event, the public affairs staff prerecorded several short videos with Dr. Cooke and members of his surgical team. The experts covered the procedure itself, as well as surgical preparedness and challenges in recovery. They also discussed the role of pathology and the biospecimen repository for important diagnostic analysis and research. The videos, photographs, graphic illustrations and links to research and other helpful information about lung cancer were included and posted throughout the day of surgery, in addition to the live-action material collected and broadcast in real time.” Good evening, Internet…

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